Taking social class out of the classroom

R
. H. Tawney wrote in 1931: “The hereditary curse upon English education is
its organisation upon lines of social class”. Very few people at that time
got much education at all. Ninety per cent of young people left school at
fourteen, only 10 per cent achieved passes in public education, less than 5
per cent went on to higher education. Britain compared poorly with education
arrangements elsewhere. The war created the opportunity for change. William
Beveridge had identified Ignorance as one of the Five Giants stalking the
land, and Rab Butler’s 1944 Education Act was the response. Education was
re-organized as a democratically accountable public service, nationally
directed but locally administered. But unlike the National Health Service,
the idea of a National Education Service has never won the affection of
British citizens in the same way. All politicians have had to convince
voters that the NHS is safe in their hands, but education has always been a
battleground, and policy is constantly changing. Success, however, remains
elusive. Eighty years after Tawney wrote, the lines of social class are as
visible as ever in English education.

Melissa Benn argues they are not only still visible but getting more so. The
1944 reform established education as a national public service for all
citizens, but it was flawed because of the tripartite system it introduced
based on selection at eleven, and because the fee-charging public schools
were not integrated into it. The introduction of comprehensive schools
during the 1960s and 70s was an attempt to remedy the first of these flaws,
but they proved controversial and their record was uneven. Since 1988,
successive secretaries of state have looked for ways to raise standards.
They have done this by increasing their powers to direct education, and
experimenting with new kinds of school outside local authority control, such
as City Technology Colleges, Academies, and now Free Schools.

the objective behind the new agenda is to privatize education In Benn’s
view, the objective behind the new agenda is to privatize education. The
term is not well chosen, since there are no proposals as yet to oblige
parents to buy education on an open market. The bulk of education remains,
like health, publicly funded. The argument is over how it is delivered. What
Benn objects to is that private sector providers, including companies and
faith groups, are being allowed to set up schools or take over existing
schools. She argues that this is undemocratic, because it seeks to prevent
local authorities from having any say in the priorities for education in
their area, and socially unjust, because it undermines the comprehensive
principle, that there should be no academic or class selection. Despite
protestations to the contrary, the education reforms of the Conservatives
and of New Labour have in practice meant that schools are now allowed to
select their pupils.

If this creates more good schools, what is the problem? The debate on
education in England has become polarized. Although there is agreement on
the goal – a good school for every child – there is deep disagreement on the
best means of achieving it. It is accepted that there are too many failing
schools, but no agreement on what caused this. There is little appetite for
a full-blown return to academic selection in its old form, since grammar
schools also under-performed. The Crowther report in 1959 found that 38 per
cent of grammar school pupils failed to achieve more than three passes at O
level, and only 9 per cent achieved five or more O levels. The evidence has
steadily mounted that grammar schools did not do much for social mobility
either. As David Willetts, now Minister of State for Universities and
Science, put it before the last election: “academic selection entrenches
advantage, it does not spread it”. He still managed to spark a row in the
Conservative Party, so toxic are these issues.

Comprehensives proved not to be the answer partly because academic selection
clung on in some areas, depriving the comprehensives of many pupils of high
intelligence, and partly because where it did not it was replaced by social
selection. Aspirational middle-class and working-class parents worked the
comprehensive system to their advantage, chiefly by learning how to play the
school catchment game. This created some very good state schools and a
larger number of mediocre and some very poor ones, associated with low
standards, poor discipline and high truancy. These “bog standard
comprehensives” were attacked as symbols of a failing education service.

the comprehensives were never given the chance to prove themselves Benn
argues that the comprehensives were never given the chance to prove
themselves. A few schools which indulged in progressive experiments like
Risinghill in Islington were pilloried in the tabloids, and a strenuous
rearguard action was mounted by parental lobbies to keep academic selection
and therefore exclusive schools. The result was that in many areas there
were no true comprehensives, because they did not achieve a balanced intake,
a true social and academic mix. As a result, many of the comprehensives were
not comprehensives but just secondary moderns under a different name. Benn
claims that true comprehensives get excellent results, and she cites the
case of Mossbourne in Hackney, East London, an Academy feted by New Labour
and the Coalition alike. The school rejects academic selection, but has
achieved extraordinary results with a balanced academic and social intake.
Benn argues that the same results cannot be achieved in many inner city
schools, because their intake is unbalanced.

Tony Blair, the prime minister under whom the Academy programme began, and the
current Education Secretary, Michael Gove, would presumably not disagree
that intakes reflecting an academic, social and cultural mix can create
excellent schools as well as making an important contribution to social
cohesion and social mobility. But how can such intakes be achieved?
Neighbourhood schools do not work because neighbourhoods are increasingly
segregated, so catchments are skewed. Benn wants to give power back to each
local council to devise a method acceptable to their voters, whether quotas,
catchments, or lotteries, to ensure all its schools have a mixed, balanced
intake. But few local authorities have managed to achieve this; most have
instead come under sustained pressure from parental lobby groups to protect
the character of existing schools, which ensures that school intakes remain
very unbalanced. Gove, following New Labour in this respect, is against
trying to achieve balanced intakes through bureaucratic means. Instead, he
seeks to create many new schools with greater control over their admissions
policy, internal management and the curriculum. The poor and the
disadvantaged are to be helped by the creation of high-quality schools that
everyone can access. The drawback of this policy is that while many
excellent new schools may be created, their relative autonomy gives them a
strong incentive to choose their pupils so as to do well in the ubiquitous
league tables, which in turn makes it possible for them to attract more of
the pupils they need to do well. Under this system, the concerns of
aspirational voters of whatever class will certainly be met. They will get
access to an excellent school, but it will partly be excellent because the
intake remains selective. For all the codes and safeguards, this will be
very difficult to police. It was hard enough for the local authorities; it
will be impossible, as Benn rightly says, for the Department of Education to
keep any kind of control over the thousands of free schools it is
encouraging. The losers, as ever, will be the children from poor backgrounds
and dysfunctional families. The likelihood is that they will continue to be
excluded from good education.

Benn is passionate about comprehensive education. Her book provides both a
very readable history of education policy since 1944 and a well-argued plea
for a return to the comprehensive principle. The tide, however, is flowing
firmly in the other direction. That may not be for ever. Public policy tends
to move in cycles, and when the problems emerge with free schools, as they
will, and they fail to deliver as much as was hoped, then there may well be
another change of direction. But it is unlikely to be back to the brave new
dawn of 1944 and the plan for a National Education Service to provide a
quality education for every child in the country. Supporters of the
comprehensive principle like Melissa Benn fear the distorting and harmful
effects if more and more schools are taken over by private companies seeking
profits or by faith groups. But perhaps they should also look at the
opportunities the new framework provides for alternative models. The
progressive movement was once a pioneer of new institutions, and it should
be again. The name “free school” deserves to be reclaimed by progressives
who, after all, invented it with schools like Summerhill, set up in 1921. A
free school should mean rather more than just being free of local authority
control. Benn mentions how the Co-operative Movement now has a network of
more than one hundred schools. Initiatives like these could provide a
practical demonstration of the capacity of the comprehensive principle to
deliver the highest-quality education, and build support for its extension.

Andrew Gamble is Professor of Politics at the University of Cambridge,
and author of The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist crisis and the politics
of recession, 2009.